Love of Nature

1
In my wife’s garden darkening at dusk
bats flit soundlessly above azaleas and forsythias.
While in the shadows below
in the final moments of twilight
paper-thin pink morning glories glow.

2
I don’t know what plants are growing
in the shade down beneath the bird feeder
but they’re growing so I haven’t the heart
to clip them or pluck them out or cover them up
with peat moss or mulch.

3
Sitting out on the back deck watching
the sky with all its blue
tumbling down through the branches and leaves
of the trees reaching
all the way to the ground.

4
In the middle of the pinkest bush
a single wine-red rose reflects the sun
something Van Gogh or Monet
would’ve thought to paint especially
with a final spurt of color as a bluebird streaks by.

An attractive employee with mussed hair
pacing outside smoking a cigarette
two construction workers discussing
in simple Beckettesque lines the difficult
old lady impossible to please
with either woodworking or painting
the family pulling up with the camping trailer
ordering the biggest breakfasts they can get
the father with two identical copies of himself
all with crew cuts and turned up noses
trailing along behind
oh McDonald’s microcosm!
I look at my reflection in your window
wondering when it was
I got to be so old and stupid looking

In this damn recurring dream
I have a fish tank an elaborate fish tank
(I don’t really, in real life have any fish tanks,
when I was a child I did, with guppies and
goldfish, black mollies and catfish,
but that was another time, another era)
a big tank, 50, 80 gallons, maybe bigger,
with plants and colored rocks,
ceramic bubblers and some large beautiful fish,
serene fish, floating along in the water,
angelfish and zebras, neon tetras
and sucker-mouths stuck to the sides.
But in this dream I keep forgetting to feed them,
I don’t remember feeding them for weeks,
yet miraculously they are all still alive,
but droopy and hungry, and I can’t
find the food and I keep getting distracted
and I should go out and buy some food,
I should feed them, I must feed them,
I’m trying to feed them, I am their god after all,
if I don’t feed them they will perish.
But I never get to it, and always fail,
wake up with these poor fish unfed and hungry.

In the car on the way home
after dropping Linda off at the Ferry,
my wife begins to complain about me again,
one of those harpies eating the liver out of my chest,
telling me that I talk about her all the time,
even the children said I talk about her too much,
and I relate everything to her and she’s sick of it,
and she explains that at Mystic Seaport
she took my camera away
because I was taking too many pictures of her.

“I feel like you’re burying me,” she says,
“It’s like I’m already dead.”
Such a terrible thing to say to me.
I don’t understand. But I’m not going to argue.
Her feelings are her feelings.

But then she stops herself suddenly
like jerking the reigns on a horse,
sees that she is being hard on me again.
She begins to cry,
“I don’t want you carrying all of this,
things are definitely getting better,
we are working our way through
this rough spot in our relationship.”

The rough spot again. The damn
ubiquitous rough spot.
I can’t seem to get rid of this rough spot.

I don’t believe her. I know she thinks
our recent troubles are all my fault,
she hasn’t done anything wrong,
she’s the same as she was a year ago,
it’s all me and my obsession with her.

But maybe she is feeling a little responsible
and guilty for picking on me
because in the middle of the night,
for the first time ever in our long marriage,
she says a few words in her sleep,
so clear and sure, yet trembling at the same time,
“Where are you going? Michael. Michael.”

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